Essays – Page 2 – WordOnion

Getting Fired Got me Published

I’ve been fired two times in my life. The first time was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina when I was seventeen and my boyfriend was eighteen. We drove down with the idea that there would be more jobs in a lively, hot-spot tourist town than in New Paltz. Better still, we’d get to be together, on our own, for the whole summer, and make lots of money. I found work – not in a […]

The Screwdriver Method

As a newly married, young mother in my first home, I spent a lot of time pulling up carpet, scraping off wallpaper, arranging, and rearranging furniture. Don’t judge me– I sponge painted one bathroom in pale pink, and across the top of the wall in the other I stenciled a geometric design of yellow and black. I hung Laura Ashley print balloon curtains in the kitchen. Please, it was the 80s! But because my […]

The Audacity Of Wanting To Be A Writer

Years ago, I was visiting a 5th grade classroom in Tarrytown, New York. Since many of the students I speak to say they “hate writing,” my hope is to change their attitude, if only a tiny bit. I want them to realize the power of language, communication, and self-expression. In those days, I would begin my “author talk” by asking the students if they could name an example of writing they felt had changed […]

Just Write For The Love Of Writing?

Years before I sold my first novel, What Every Girl Except me Knows, I went to a writing conference in New Jersey. It was mostly attended by women–those conferences usually are- but one of the breakout sessions was led by a male editor at a small New York publishing house. Following his talk was a Q&A. Hands flew up. What was trending? “By the time a book comes out in print, that trend has […]

Nine Rules for Turning Fact Into Fiction

1. Find the single sentence. What is this story about? Get rid of every character and every scene that does not answer to that one thread. 2. Write the specific, not the universal. It will be the experience of this one character and the salient, distinct, unique details of his or her life, which, if done well, will speak to a larger human experience. It doesn’t work the other way around. 3. Self-pity does not […]

Interview With Jon Winokour

ADVICE TO WRITERS How did you become a writer? I suppose that is a two-part question. I wanted to be a writer since I was twelve years old. At that point in my life I had moved eleven times and gone to five different schools, had been abandoned by my mother, my father, and then most recently my step-mother. On July 25, 1974, I wrote in my diary, “It was just today I realized […]

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